this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Fair points, I’m not a linguist. I mostly was just going off the dates I could find for old-early-middle-modern periods for each language.
The end of the vowel shift was what seemed to separate early-modern from late-modern English, and the establishment of the academy marks the beginning of modern regulations on the French language. As such I thought those were good enough markers to compare the current versions with each other.
Anyway good point about old English also being the source of a language that isn’t English. And yeah I mean trying to gauge the age of a language is bound to be arbitrary since languages don’t abruptly change. Kind of a ship of Theseus situation. At what point did one language become another? Are they the same because we call them all English or are they different because old English and modern English don’t appear to be the same language?